After a year of dumping various sorts of chlorine into the pool, I finally got all the bits and pieces together to automate the chlorine addition process. The key element that pushed me over the hump was learning I could open a COD account at Hill Brothers Chemical to buy commercial quantities of high [...]

After ~5 years of reliable service from our GE Adora front loading washer, the first repair it needed was to replace the torn door gasket. Upon finding a pool of water under the washer, I was rather miffed that the material would fail so catastrophically. However, upon opening the bottom panel, I found the [...]

My first Arduino project was to build a battery capacity tester. I’ve got a box of rechargeable AA batteries, and it seams they’ve been less and less effective. Since most applications require 4 batteries, invariably one problem battery makes the rest of them look bad.

The thought of spending over $1k for the BMW panniers (that aren’t even water proof) is totally absurd to me. Other aftermarket options add up to >$700+ by the time you buy the special F800 adapter frame for them. I guess I just couldn’t justify such expense for something that will only get put on the [...]

The universal mounting/adapter plate that comes with the Givi E370N top case gives many options for bolt placement, but, unfortunately the rest of the hardware is inadequate to work on BMW F800ST luggage rack.

My goals for the install:

No drilling/modification of the luggage rack
Offer some amount of cushion/padding to prevent the hard case from marring the paint.
Position [...]

Researched tank-less hot water heaters and their voracious demand for natural gas. Decided to go for the Takagi T-K3-OS because: 1) it is for outdoor installation — no fancy exhaust flume required, and 2) its *minimum* BTU rating of 11K was one of the lowest I’d seen (considering that the maximum side was more than capable).

Never realized how easy it is to duplicate a directory tree from one machine to another through the network without building an intermediate tarball and finding room for it and the original files all at the same time. Simply pipe the tar command through ssh and untar it on the fly.